by G. Jeffrey MacDonald, USA TODAY

by G. Jeffrey MacDonald, USA TODAY

BOSTON â?? A friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev testified for the first time Monday at a hearing to determine whether his initial statements to the FBI can be used in his obstruction-of-justice trial.

Lawyers for Dias Kadyrbayev, Tsarnaev's college classmate and friend, argue that the Russian-speaking University of Massachusetts student does not know enough English to have understood his legal rights when police questioned him.

Kadyrbayev testified that when he was given a form to sign acknowledging his right to counsel, he asked an FBI agent whether he needed a lawyer.

"'Oh, no no no'," he said the agent told him. " 'You're not under arrest. You're just helping us out.' "

At that point, he said, he stopped reading the form and signed it.

When he was first questioned in an FBI vehicle, Kadyrbayev said, "I was kind of scared." He said an agent cursed at him and demanded to know Tsarnaev's whereabouts.

When he heard that Tsarnaev had been captured in Watertown, Mass., he testified, he asked, "Can I go, now that you've got him?" The answer was "Maybe," he said.

He was unaware that leaving was an option, he testified.

Kadyrbayev, 20, painted a picture of himself as a young man who wasn't serious about learning English, got passed along in English classes in his native Kazakhstan and paid English speakers to rewrite his college essays.

Kadyrbayev said his English has become "10 times" better since he's been in jail. He credited the improvement to reading books and listening to radio. He said he's read 76 books since his incarceration a year ago.

Linguist Aneta Pavlenko testified that Kadyrbayev, a native of Kazakhstan, thinks in Russian and doesn't have the language skills to understand a legal document or a written Miranda warning.

Kadyrbayev, who is charged with obstructing justice for allegedly retrieving Tsarnaev's backpack from his dorm room and throwing it out after the bombing, wants his initial statements to the FBI excluded from his trial Sept. 8. Defense attorney Robert Stahl said Kadyrbayev made the statements under duress and without access to a public defender.

Prosecutors have noted that Kadyrbayev saw himself at the time of the interrogation as proficient in English. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Capin said Kadyrbayev studied five years of English in Kazakhstan, earning the highest possible grades, and spent three summers abroad studying the language in English-speaking countries.

In Kazakhstan, Kadyrbayev said, he attended a specialized school for math and physics where teachers "didn't care" about English and awarded good grades even for low performers. He spent a summer studying English in Cambridge, Mass., to be near a girlfriend in New Jersey but said he seldom attended class. He applied to the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, he said, because his English skills were not good enough for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He denied writing a college essay that prosecutors used to show English proficiency. His method, he explained, was to find articles in Russian, use Google Translate to convert them to English, then pay a native English speaker to look it over. If more writing was needed, he would pay someone to write for him.

At the hearing Monday, he didn't wait for an interpreter to translate questions before replying.

Pavlenko, a Temple University linguist who studies how native Russian speakers learn English in the USA, examined e-mails and texts Kadyrbayev wrote around the time of his questioning. She noted mistakes in syntax that peg him as a "low intermediate" English speaker whose use of slang and swear words made him seem more fluent than he is.

The Miranda rights document he received from the FBI is written in a way that can be confusing to non-native speakers, she said, citing "Anything you say can be used against you in court."

" 'Anything you say' - it may mean to him, 'You can say anything,' " Pavlenko said, because he thinks in Russian and would need higher-level skills to grasp the true meaning.

Pavlenko's testimony came on Day 4 of an evidence hearing, which has been in recess since May 15.

When prosecutors questioned Kadyrbayev, they used documents to make a case that his advanced English skills are not new and to portray him and someone who would lie to avoid consequences.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephanie Siegmann pointed out that Kadyrbayev went before a judge who read him his rights last year, but he never asked for a translator at federal court until today. When his girlfriend gave a deposition in English last year, he and a translator were in attendance but he did not request that any words be translated.

"You have lied before to get out of trouble, haven't you?," Siegmann asked.

"Yes," he said.

On two occasions, he hired men to pose as professors at UMass Dartmouth and lie to his mother about his status there, he acknowledged. One accepted $100 to assure her that he was enrolled and making progress in his coursework.

Kadyrbayev was dismissed from UMass Dartmouth after not going to his classes, he said. He was warned that he needed to leave the United States immediately when his student visa expired but he stayed illegally.

Kadyrbayev is scheduled to be back on the witness stand at 9 a.m. Tuesday.

Two other friends of Tsarnaev face charges. Azamat Tazhayakov is charged with obstruction of justice for allegedly working with Kadyrbayev to dispose of the backpack. Robel Phillipos is accused of lying to federal investigators. Both men attended the hearing. Tazhayakov will be tried June 30; Phillipos' trial will begin Sept. 29.

None of the friends is accused of participating in the bombings or knowing about them ahead of time.

Tsarnaev's trial on 30 charges, including using a weapon of mass destruction to kill three people, is scheduled to begin Nov. 3 in Boston. His lawyers have asked the judge to move the trial elsewhere and to give them more time to prepare a defense.